Walsh, Iran-contra special prosecutor, dies at 102
Faced attacks during investigation of case
Lawrence E. Walsh, the special prosecutor who spent six years investigating misconduct by President Reagan administration officials in the Iran-contra affair, has died. He was 102.
He died Wednesday at his home in Oklahoma City following a brief illness, according to his family.
Walsh was a highly successful Wall Street lawyer who served as a federal judge, president of the American Bar Association and as the No. 2 official at the Justice Department in the Eisenhower administration.
But the highest profile work of his life was as a court-appointed independent counsel in the Irancontra controversy.
“I found myself at the center of a constitutional maelstrom,” Walsh recalled in his 1997 book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up.
“While struggling to learn the truth and unravel a willful coverup that extended all the way to the Oval Office, my staff and I had to fend off attacks from members of Congress and the president’s Cabinet,” Walsh wrote.
Iran-contra had its roots in two covert operations directed from the Reagan White House.
The White House linked the two operations by secretly diverting millions of dollars from the Iran arms sales into buying guns for the contra rebels.
When the diversion was exposed in 1986, the Reagan administration had to call for a criminal investigation by an independent prosecutor. A panel of three federal appeals judges chose Walsh.
Eleven people pleaded guilty or were convicted by juries in Iran-contra.
But the two biggest victories for Walsh’s prosecutors — convictions of national security adviser John Poindexter and former Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North — were overturned on appeal.